Baby Mine
by ocean aesthetic
Summary: Olivia Millar was sixteen years old when she gave birth to her son, Inigo. Her stepfather had once again manipulated the situation to force the rest of the family turn her and her unborn son away at the announcement of the pregnancy. What is in store for the mother and child? Cross-post from AO3. Rating subject to change.
1. Chapter 1

Olivia Millar was sixteen when she fell pregnant.

She was sixteen still when she fled from home with only a rucksack of clothes and a handful of pocket change to get her through the week. In hindsight her mother probably would have kept her home, cared for her and guided her through the trials her body was about to undergo, despite her disappointment - it was her stepfather that cast her out, point-blank refusing to keep an unwed mother in his home ( ** _his_** home, he said, as though he had purchased the house himself and not moved into it after marrying Olivia's mother).

Her son, a tiny premature baby boy, was born at 7 months gestation, just over 8 weeks shy of his due date. The nurses rushed him away the second he was born, leaving Olivia flushed, sweaty, short of breath and sobbing in the hospital bed. Alone, as she had faced most of her pregnancy. Alone, as she would face the six weeks her son spent in the special care unit, swathed in wires - wires in his nose, wires in his arm, wires taped to his chest. Alone, as she would face child rearing thereafter, learning to be a mother without the guidance of her own.

Alone, as she would be as she became a woman, an adult, a _mother_ , in her own right.

"Hurry up, honey," Olivia called out to her son, struggling to right her suitcase as it petulantly tried to tip on its side. "I don't think the taxi man is going to be nice enough to wait for us forever." The single carry bag she had, a diaper bag she had used when Inigo was a baby, had already been stuffed to the brim and stowed in the taxi boot while she was struggling to haul the suitcase down the path. It was a scene she had been through many times before. The suitcase, while unwieldy, had been her trusted companion over the past five years. The diaper bag had been something she had been lucky enough to come across at a second hand store when she was about five months pregnant, for a price she was lucky enough to be able to afford at the time on a shelf stocker's salary.  
While the taxi driver and Olivia struggled with lifting the suitcase high enough to wedge it into the taxi boot, Inigo clambered out of the house as fast as he could, clutching his seal toy to his chest. That had also been brought at a second hand store, this time shortly after he left the hospital for the first time - the fur on the seal's back had been previously rubbed away, as though by vigorous brushing, and Olivia had needed to sew another little glass eye onto it. Threadbare, and with a slightly wonky eye from the DIY repair, it was evidently a well-loved plush toy, even before her son had gotten his tiny hands on it. It fit into their wonky, two-person family perfectly.

"Mama, do we gotta go?"  
She knew the tone well. Inigo could be a whiny boy sometimes, especially when he was tired or unwilling to do something asked of him. He took the same tone whenever she asked him to put his Legos back in their little tub.  
With the suitcase finally packed away, Olivia turned to her son, kneeling down to eye level with him as she gently took his right hand. He clutched the seal closer to his chest with his left arm, biting his lip uncertainly.  
"We do, honey. Mama's work finished, and nobody else has any work to do here. We need to go to this place so we can get money and get some good food in that little belly of yours!"  
Releasing his hand, she lightly tickled her son's belly, making him squeal with delight. A gentle smile spread over Olivia's face, a smile that could only be described as maternal, as she gently scooped Inigo into her arms, carrying him to the taxi to secure him into his baby seat.

Not long into the car ride, maybe fifteen minutes, and Inigo had fallen asleep in the car seat, his seal dropped into his lap while he was too tired to continue holding it close. It was of small relief that the driver was not the talkative type; both of them had always been on the shy side, and she doubted if she could prevent herself spouting out her entire life story if she began talking. Instead, Olivia stared out at the scenery flashing by; farmlands, countryside stretches, a few abandoned barns and old, ramshackle farmhouses, mostly made of wood and wrought by termites and the weather. She wondered, not for the first time, if what she was doing was truly the right thing, if it was truly the best way for her little boy to grow up. Bounced from house to house, staying with people kind enough to lend them their guest rooms until, inevitably, work dried up and they had to leave again.  
Not for the first time, she wondered if she really should have put her son up for adoption like she had considered after his birth. She wondered if he would fare better with a stable family that would provide for him properly, give him the stable home he deserved. The home she could not provide for him.

She would have still been in school. She could have graduated. She could have grown up like every other teenager her age, and Robin-

She snapped herself out of the thought, biting down hard on her bottom lip. There was no point to thinking about Robin now, though she had done so many nights before. The choices she had made and the consequences they brought around couldn't be changed, and the only thing to do was continue powering forward on her chosen path. The taxi barrelled on, winding through old country roads, nearing the destination town with every ticking second.


	2. Chapter 2

It was about one in the afternoon around when the taxi had pulled up into the driveway of what was to be their new home (for the next few months, at least). The four hour drive had taken its toll; Inigo was fast asleep in his car seat, and Olivia was barely hanging on to consciousness herself. In truth, though, they were very similar in that way; as a child it had been easy to lull her into sleep by the soft bumpy motions of a car ride as well.  
She reached over, gently shaking her son's arm to rouse him.  
"Honey, we're here. It's time to wake up."  
Inigo was difficult to wake at the best of times - this was no different. He let out a high-pitched noise and turned his head away from his mother, immediately falling straight back to sleep. _Typical_.  
"You want me to get your luggage out onto the path over there?"  
Olivia looked over to the taxi driver in the front seat as he craned around to look at them. For a second she failed to answer. She didn't expect to be addressed, and had no reply ready for him.  
"Um, that would be lovely," she managed to choke out at the last second, rapidly turning away to undo the excessively difficult belt on her sleeping son's car seat. "Thank you."

By the time her suitcase and bag were on the driveway, along with Inigo's car seat, Olivia had realised - too late - that the garage door was firmly shut, with no way of telling if the landlady was in. Inigo was still semi-sleeping after finally being roused, drowsily clutching her skirt as he leaned against her thigh for support - thank God for the belt, she thought, otherwise it would probably be pulled off by the force her son was exerting on it - as they stood on the sidewalk of the driveway, wondering where to go from there. The taxi had already pulled away, no doubt onto its next job, and Olivia did not have the money to request another ride into town, much less the fare for the ride back. They couldn't simply walk into town either. She had no clue of the lay of the land here, no clue of the directions to the town center - much less how long it would take, on foot, with luggage and a sleepy toddler. She doubted the lady of the house was around either.  
They had talked on the phone after Olivia had seen the advertisement in the paper looking for a tenant to house share with - the landlady was a woman named Flavia, probably in her forties from the sound of her voice, worked as a police officer, had lost her husband a few years ago, and was renting out the room in order to get a little more money to repay the mortgage with.

And then, as she was thinking on it, it clicked - she had spoken to Flavia on the phone a few days prior. If she was lucky (and calm enough to have remembered to save the number at the time), she would be able to call the woman to see where she was. Scrolling down her phone contacts, passing number after number... And then she sighed in resignation. She hadn't thought far enough ahead to save the number to her contacts.

Her day was made suddenly better - being used in a sarcastic sense - by her phone letting out a high-pitched beep at her, letting her know that today was supposed to be the day she had her B12 injection. At a clinic she had no way of accessing. Within the next few hours.  
She realised what was happening within seconds. Her blood fell cold as it flowed away from her face. Her chest tightened as she began to gasp for air. Shaking.  
Vision blurring.

Stomach twisting.

"Mama?"

The soft voice of her fearful son immediately brought Olivia out of her panic attack. Closing her eyes, taking a deep breath in, and steadying her nerves, she braced herself to inform her son that they were going to be stuck outside for a while. She exhaled the breath slowly, crouching down to eye level with Inigo.  
"Inigo, honey, what is it?"  
His dark brown eyes - his mother's eyes - looked up at her, wide with curiosity, as he clung to her woollen jumper instead of her skirt, his little hand grasping the fabric of her sleeve as tightly as he could.  
"Mama, who's the lady at the door? Is she our new home friend?"  
She blinked for a few seconds, not entirely certain of what her son had said to her until it sunk in completely. After she had finally understood what he had said, though, she stood up so fast that darkness began to cloud her vision and take over her consciousness - _Gods damn her weak body_ \- and whipped around to see a middle-aged woman with mahogany skin and golden hair in the doorway, clad in what looked to be gym gear with a messenger bag slung over her left shoulder.

"Olivia, I presume?"

The tension that left the young mother's body was almost palpable as her shoulders sagged deeply from their previously-tense position, letting out an entire lung's capacity of air in a heavy sigh as she let her anxiety go and began to breathe properly again.  
"Yes, and this is my son. I'm so sorry we got here so early, I expected much more traffic than we got-"  
The other woman cut her off by laughing and shaking her head, dropping her bag to the floor before stepping out the door to approach Olivia.  
"I think you're the only person I've ever met to apologise for being early! Come in, I'll show you to the room and let you get settled in. Pass the suitcase here, I can take it."  
Inigo kept his near-threadbare seal clutched to his chest with one arm as he grasped his mother's hand tightly, willingly but anxiously led into the new house that would be their home for the next few months.

"Thank you," she smiled at her new landlady as she followed her down the hallway toward what she assumed was to be their shared bedroom. "That case is so... difficult to deal with, I wonder if it's even worth the effort sometimes." She took in the lay of the house as she walked, each room she passed to get to the bedroom, where the bathroom might be, and how to get to the kitchen. The house was a bungalow, so it wasn't like having to memorise what floor everything was on (or haul her sleepy son up a flight of stairs because he couldn't make it to bed again).  
"It's no problem at all, my dear." Her reply was short but not curt, being more focused on keeping the suitcase from careening onto its side than conversing. "Now, there is also a bathroom in your bedroom, so don't worry about rushing the little one down the hall if he needs to go in the night. Your door also locks-" she stopped in front of a closed door, pushing it open with her hip, "from the inside, if you press the button on the doorknob before closing it. The keys to open the bedroom door are different from the ones to open the front door, so you'll get the two of them on the same ring, and have the peace of mind that only you can open the door."

Olivia was on the verge of thanking the woman again, she had just begun to open her mouth, when her phone let out another chiming noise - her second reminder about her appointment. She almost dropped her bag as the blood drained from her face - she had nearly forgotten! - and by the way Flavia had turned around to look at her, there had been a statement she was supposed to respond to, but she was frozen in time.

By the time her wits came back a minute or so later, she was sat on the edge of the bed in what was to be her bedroom, her son snuggled up to her side, eyes downcast as he sucked on his thumb nervously, his seal in his lap. He never had known how to take his mother's sudden shut-downs; they had only been a problem since she had to start her medications again, though he had known nothing else. She had been put back on them shortly before she found she was pregnant. This hopeless, anxious version of herself was all he knew of his mother for the time being.

"Would you like to tell me what happened there, Olivia?"  
Flavia had squatted down in front of her, roughly at eye level with her. Olivia gulped, closing her eyes and exhaling deeply. If she remembered correctly, this woman had been a mother before, and would likely continue to gently press until she found the problem.  
"I have an appointment in twenty minutes and I don't know where the clinic is," she managed to force out with a brittle voice. ** _God no_** , she thought, **_don't cry in front of everyone. Inigo needs you to be strong. Don't put a weird impression on Flavia. Don't cry here, Olivia. Don't do it-_**  
A tear slipped down her cheek with a soft, strangled noise from the back of her throat. Wonderful, and now she was crying in front of the woman who would be sharing her house for the next few months. She doubted there was a way to make it any worse.  
"Tell me which clinic it is. There's two in the town, both on the route to the gym. I'll take you there on the way." She reached out and patted the crying Olivia on the thigh gently, reassuringly. "Is it something important? You mentioned you had medical issues when you first made contact."  
Olivia shook her head as she swallowed back the rest of her tears, softly, silently refusing to let slip any more details about the issue.  
"It's the clinic on Border Road, if that helps at all." She dried her cheeks with the ball of her right palm, gently resting her left hand on the top of her son's head.  
"That's all I needed to know, it's the only clinic on that road. Bring the car seat, I'll take the both of you there."

"Thank you so much for this, Flavia," Olivia gushed nervously, cheeks still a little pink from crying, clutching the bag full of her medical documents to her stomach as the car took its final left into the clinic car park. "I'm so grateful you did this for us."  
"Oh please," the older woman laughed, pulling easily into one of the available parking lots. "You're a part of the household now. It's nothing I wouldn't do for anyone, especially since this is so near to the gym."  
"Still, I appreciate it," she smiled at her new landlady, undoing her seatbelt. "Some of the houses we lived in before wouldn't even have helped us move that suitcase into the house."  
She simply raised an eyebrow in disbelief for her response, allowing Olivia time to retrieve her son from the back of the car, where he had again fallen asleep in his car seat.

"Now, if you walk through the park at the back of this place, there's a path that will lead right to the street the house is on." Flavia gestured through her rolled-down car window as Olivia stood on the curb a few steps away, her child balanced carefully on her hip, the opposite one to her infusion pump. Even though he was light for his age, it was becoming a struggle to hold him like that for more than a few minutes, and eventually it would be all but impossible. "If you get lost, try to find Arena Street and go to number 12. There's a woman who lives there who will give you directions, or even invite you in for a drink if you're hopelessly lost. I won't be back for another three hours from now, so take the keys or else you'll be stuck outside all day."  
The young mother nodded sagely as she tried to memorise all the information she was being given. It would end up on her phone in a few minutes, or else she would likely forget it all.  
"Thank you again, Flavia." Olivia waved with her free hand. "You really helped me today."  
She was shooed into the clinic by a jokingly offended Flavia, teased about her propensity to thank people repeatedly, before the landlady pulled away and left the two on the curb, Olivia setting Inigo onto the floor as she readied herself to attend her appointment. Immediately, he began to whine to be carried again because, what else did she expect, he was tired. She had just woken him up early from a nap. She steeled herself as they began to walk toward the clinic's doors, Inigo whining to himself about having to walk.

The waiting room was not going to be a fun experience.

Somehow, by some miracle, he had behaved well during the waiting room stay, and at the beginning of the appointment, even at the point when the doctor had to give Olivia her supplement injection and check up on how her infusion pump was working.  
Unfortunately, by the time the true consultation section of the appointment had begun, he had started to act restless.

"Now, Ms. Millar, I'm sure you're aware that people in your position need to be extremely careful about their dosage and frequency of medication."  
The doctor was a surprisingly young man, for a doctor - he was probably thirty at the oldest - with feminine features and long blonde hair pulled away from his face in a ponytail. He had his hands folded in his lap as he watched Olivia, who at that point was anxiously squirming in her seat. He sighed, giving her a small, reassuring smile.  
"You aren't in trouble, Ms. Millar, don't worry. This is a consultation, not a meeting with your boss. I just want to be certain that, with the volume of medications you take, and the number of your illnesses, that you are aware of your situation and keep to your regimen."  
Olivia tugged her son into her lap as he began to get bored, wandering around the small consultation room, touching as many implements as he could, probably thinking up a myriad of imaginary uses for them all.  
"I do try to keep my medicines on a timer, Doctor," she murmured abashedly, chewing on her bottom lip. Inigo squirmed in her arms, groaning unhappily. "It's just difficult to remember them all, with my son and work..."  
"I understand," he said, nodding deeply. "Being a single working mother is not easy, especially not with the scope of disorders you have. Many women would struggle with just diabetes, but you have other disorders working against you as well. Not only that, but you have a child to care for with no partner and a full-time job." He fixed her with a look that could only be described as soothing, or placating. "You have a very large burden, Ms. Millar, and you seem to be functioning exceptionally well under it."  
Blood rushed to her face at the compliment as she shoved down the urge to rebut it. She had to learn how to take compliments in her stride, so her son could grow up to learn how to do so. She refused to teach him the shyness that had been drilled into her at his age.  
"Now, I have your blood paperwork here - you can drop by any time Tuesday or Thursday to have it done - and your referral for your liver biopsy to see how your treatment is progressing. If all goes well, you may even be able to end your azathioprine and prednisone again."


	3. Interstitial

"So, how did it go?"

The two women had settled down in the living room for a few hours before bed, Flavia with a glass of wine and Olivia with a mug of hot chocolate. Whatever was on the TV was going ignored - the volume had been turned down to a quiet drone since Inigo had been put to bed an hour ago. Olivia took a gulp of her drink, brow crinkling as she thought out how she would answer.  
"It was alright, actually. We managed to find our way home pretty easily, but it was a little... longer than I thought it would be." She shifted in her seat, tucking her ankles under her thigh. "Inigo was exhausted when we got in."  
"At least he'll sleep through the night!" Flavia laughed to herself, leaning forward to put her emptied wine glass onto the coffee table. "My two were terrors at bedtime. It was hell on earth trying to get them to sleep until morning."  
Her fingers drummed on the side of the mug for a few minutes before speaking next.  
"What were your kids like?" She kept her hands clasped tightly around the mug. "I-I mean, I was an only child, my sister wasn't raised around me, she's my step-sister, you see, and-" Her breath cut off sharply as she realised she was running her mouth. She drew her legs up to her chest, dislodging her feet from under her. "I'm sorry. I just, I mean, I was sixteen when I had Inigo, and his father passed away before he was old enough to remember him. I don't... I don't know if I can be a real mother for him. I don't know how all this works."

She appraised the young mother for a second, mulling over her response carefully before speaking.  
"They were complete brats as children," she said with a nostalgic smile that completely betrayed the fact that she was not speaking ill of them. "We did our best as parents - it's all we could do. And they both ended up fine." She fixed Olivia with what must have been the most intense look she had seen in years. "Inigo is happy. He's a good boy, and you're doing your best to do right by him. You're doing just fine."

A second of silence passed between them, interrupted by the sound of claws tapping on plastic from the other side of the room. Flavia raised an eyebrow at Olivia in amusement, watching the confusion cross over the younger woman's face before she remembered that Flavia's dog slept in his crate in the living room.  
"I suppose he's getting restless because of the new smells." The landlady elevated her legs onto the coffee table, crossing one ankle over the other. "The only people Basilio is used to being here were me and the kids."  
Olivia's attention back on the landlady, she took a second to process what she had been told.  
"I'm sorry if this is intrusive, but... where did he get his name from?" She drained the last of her drink at the end of her query, eyes still on the other woman in interest. Flavia sighed with a fond smile, leaning back in the chair.  
"I named him after my husband," she began, moving her line of sight to the floor. "You know, they say that the bigger the man, the bigger the void he leaves in his wake? There's no replacing him, now or ever. I just wanted something in his memory. Our kids are all grown up - our daughter is backpacking around other countries and our son is in university, you see. They don't visit anymore. He's companionship in the spirit of the original Basilio."  
The bloom of guilt in the depths of her stomach had her inwardly biting her tongue for being so insensitive - she wondered just how deeply she had hurt her landlord by bringing up those memories.

Again, just as she was about to be drawn into a pit of her own introspection, she was interrupted. Only, this time, she was interrupted by her son, looking small as ever in his dinosaur pajamas and his thumb in his mouth.  
 _Oh dear. That's a self-soothe motion._  
"Hi baby," Olivia said in a practiced voice, learned from soothing him many times. She pushed herself up from the lounge chair, crouching down in front of him with her arms out in case he needed a hug. "Are you okay? What happened?"  
He fell forward into his mother's arms, gently pushing his face into her shoulder as she wound her arms around him, humming a quiet lullaby tune.  
"Bad dream," he murmured, his small fists closing around her jumper, clasping his legs to her waist as she stood up with her son in her arms.  
"It's okay," she said, gently bouncing him as well as she was able. The kid was getting heavy, and soon she would be completely unable to hold him like this. "Mama's here. Do you want me to sing you another lullaby?"  
He shook his head against her shoulder before pushing his forehead harder against her. "Wanna sleeps."

From the way his breaths were becoming snuffly he was going to cry soon, too.

Olivia turned back to Flavia with an apologetic look.  
"I'm sorry, I need to get him back to bed." She rested her cheek against the top of child's head as an extra comforting motion. He'd loved that as a baby, especially when he began teething - sleeping on his mother's chest with her cheek against the top of his head soothed him back to sleep almost every time.  
The older woman waved it off, stretching her legs out slightly.  
"It's absolutely fine. It might be time for me to turn in myself. I suppose I'm not getting any younger!"  
"I'll see you in the morning," the young mother smiled, still bouncing her son on her hip. She opened her mouth again, ready to thank her for the room, before quickly changing her mind. She settled for another smile, sweeping out of the room, singing a lullaby to her son.

 _"You are so precious to me, sweet as can be, baby of mine..."_


	4. Chapter 4

"Mama, are we gonna go somewhere?"  
Inigo sat fully dressed on the edge of the double bed - he'd had to share it with his mother, as there was nowhere else for him to sleep - clutching a wooden toy plane in his hand, waving it around in the air to pretend it was flying around him. His little feet, already in his socks and shoes, kicked shallowly back and forth, gently bouncing off the bed's base. Olivia stood up from her previous position, having finished twisting her freshly-washed hair up into a towel to prevent it dampening her blouse, and looked over at her son. He looked back at her, rounded brown eyes watching her with measured curiousity as he waited for her to answer his question.

"Yes honey, we have to go out today," she began cautiously. If she was too blase, he would likely have a tantrum - he was at that difficult age, and not really interested in doing things he didn't like. She turned back away, pushing open the sliding door to the wardrobe to retrieve the skirt she had decided on wearing at the last minute. Everything else had been planned out beforehand - she had deliberated on whether to wear that, or a pantsuit, as she had wound her hair up into a towel. "Mama has an appointment to go to. We need to go see a man to try and get a new job, or we won't have any money." A pause, just as she began to put her right leg into the newly unfolded skirt. It occurred to her that she still had to replace and reaffix her insulin. "You should go get some breakfast, or you'll be hungry when it's time to leave. Try and eat something this time, baby, okay?"

He grumbled in concession, dropping the plane in favor of his threadbare seal as he left the bedroom. She knew he would likely end up only drinking a carton of apple juice; he was nauseous most mornings, and unable to eat solid food, but Olivia knew better than most that any food was nothing but good news when blood sugar was involved. She also knew that his annoyance would pass. It wasn't an outright tantrum, and he would likely forget why he was upset in the first place once she gave him the coloring book and crayons she had purchased specifically for him to play with during the interview. She sucked her stomach in as she squirmed into the skirt and zipped it up. In the end, it was a size or so too small, and it constricted the smallest part of her waist uncomfortably - you're getting fat, echoed her brain, you need to adjust your meds, you need to stop eating so much ready made food, you're a mess - but it looked presentable, at least, which is what she was aiming for.

Olivia hitched the pencil skirt up as far as she could, contemplating whether the infusion pump would fit discreetly enough under such a tight garment. It was an unwieldy black box, about the size of a retro cassette player, and even when placed strategically could be hard to hide. It sat on the bedside table, the cannula and other assorted equipment still in its sterile packaging underneath it. She'd removed it before her shower, since it was time to remove her cannula anyway - they only really lasted between two to three days to begin with - and it was the perfect situation to change all the necessary pieces. It had already been rewound to the beginning of the administration cycle, ready to receive the insulin cartridge whenever she was ready to insert it.  
Half of the reason she had shooed her son out so quickly was that she was not comfortable changing her diabetic control equipment around him - she did not want him too close to the cannula once opened, and there was a chance that if she placed the cartridge down once it had been drawn from the vial that he could knock it off the table and break it.

She ripped the package open, assembling the makeshift syringe. The little glass vial of insulin was already on the counter alongside the rest of the equipment, taken out of the fridge just before the shower in preperation for changing the reserve cartridge.  
Drawing the insulin had always been a problem - it took a lot of concentration and patience to draw up the liquid without any air bubbles, and sometimes up to five draws were needed until she could get the right amount of medication into the cartridge. Luckily, she'd managed to draw up the correct amount with no air bubbles on only the second attempt, and she pulled the plunger and needle out of the syringe, leaving only the insulin-filled cartridge.  
The rest of the process was much simpler. Open the packaging that the cannula and tubing were inside, uncoil the tubing, take away the greaseproof paper over the bandage surrounding the cannula, and set the needlepiece into the piercing gun. She pressed the plastic circle against her skin, where the cannula would be ejected into, and pressed the sides, firing it into her arm. She had gotten used to the sensation of the cannula years ago. While the pain was much more pronounced when she began taking insulin, by that point it was barely noticeable unless she hit a particularly disagreeable spot of skin, or caught her muscle with the needle.  
The cartridge was loaded into the pump, the tubing connected securely, and a protective cap screwed into place to prevent either the tubing or cartridge falling out. Next was to make sure the insulin traveled through the tubing properly - she set the pump to eject a small amount of insulin through the tube, held upwards above the pump, until a small amount dripped out of the end where it would soon be connected to the port. Then it was a simple case of securely connecting the tubing to the port in the cannula, and she was finally done. She breathed a sigh of relief - Inigo was still out of the bedroom, and her refill was finished. She gently pressed her fingers into the round bandage, making sure the adhesive was properly secured, before setting her basal insulin rate for the day and clipping the pump to the band of her bra, buttoning her blouse up and bundling the old, used pump pieces into her portable plastic sharps disposal bin to finish up the process. She checked over the contents of her purse again - mobile phone, keys, blood glucose monitor, continuous glucose monitor, a small bottle of water in case Inigo was thirsty, a few quick-access snacks for both of them, emergency insulin administration supplies, and a tiny wad of paper that important numbers and addresses were scribbled onto.

Her high heels, unworn for so long that they felt almost foreign to her feet, clacked uncomfortably loudly against the tiled floor of the hallway. Thank god Flavia already left for work. As she approached the doorway she peeked around the frame - as expected, her son was sat on the floor, cross-legged in front of the television with a box of apple juice. For a second after hearing the low drone of a program turned down low, Olivia questioned how he could have turned on the TV - there was no way he could have figured it out on his own, he was five for Gods' sake - before she recalled that Flavia had told her last night that it would be left on so the dog would have something to listen to and prevent any seperation anxiety.  
"Are you ready to go, Inigo?" He jumped at the noise of his mother's voice. He hadn't caught her in his peripheral vision, and must have been too engrossed in whatever was on TV to have heard her approach.  
"No," he responded quickly, pouting as he looked down at the plush seal in his lap, making an obvious point to not look at his mother. Olivia sighed, sitting down next to her son, her legs tucked under her thigh.  
"I don't want to go either, baby," she said softly, gently reaching out to stroke her son's hair. "But this is important, and I promise we wouldn't be going out today if we didn't have to."  
He grumbled unhappily as he leaned into his mother's touch. "But I don't like it. I want to be here instead."  
"I know," she murmured, gently applying pressure to draw her son toward her. He allowed her to pull him in for a hug, pressing his face into her shoulder, with the same dour look on his face. "But sometimes we all need to do things we don't like. I'm sorry for making you do this, but it's really important."  
The young boy sighed in concession, pushing himself away from his mother.  
"Remember to throw your juice box away," she reminded him as he begrudgingly pulled himself up to his feet. She reminded herself that they would have to catch the bus into the town center; with the way Inigo had resisted the idea of having to leave the house, she knew he would have a large scale tantrum in public if she made him walk all the way into the town center for her interview, on top of it being cruel to have a five year old boy walk up to forty five minutes just to sit around for another thirty minutes so his mother could go to a job interview.

Thank the Gods for coloring books.

"So, Ms. Millar, you mentioned in your application that you previously had two years' total experience as a waitress at several seperate venues. Would you mind explaining why you haven't had stable employment in the past few years?"  
Olivia swallowed, willing her hands to stay still in her lap instead of fiddling with her skirt, willing her eyes to stay affixed to the vicinity of the man behind the desk. Though his office was dismal and dark, her eyes were prone to wander in any direction when she was faced with this kind of situation. She knew from experience, though, that any sign of anxiety could possibly cause a future employer to reject her application. She had to appear confident and poised at all times.  
She was sorely in need of a job, after all.  
Unfortunately, with her medications working against her by kicking up her anxiety a notch, it was proving to be one hell of a challenge. It wasn't particularly helpful that her interviewer was about as interesting as a wet paper bag, with all the emotional range of a walnut, and the twenty-minute-long interview was mainly comprised at him staring intently at her.

"I work on a temporary basis, filling emergency vacancies like the ones made by maternity leave," she babbled out, a little too quick to defend herself. "The vacancies are usually only a few months of work, so I tend to have to have several workplaces per year."  
The man interviewing heer - stout, with grease-shined black hair flattened against his skull, wearing a suit that was a size or so too small - raised an eyebrow with an uninterested noise. He looked from Olivia to Inigo, seated on a too-tall chair in the corner of the room, intently coloring. His eyes flicked back to the resume in his hands.  
It wasn't the best sign in the world at that moment.

"Well, thank you for your time, Ms. Millar," he began, his previously honeylike voice turning nasal and grating, seeming to bounce off the walls to fill the entire room. "Your application looks stellar. We'll get back to you in a few weeks to tell you if you got the job."

It was a few hours shy of early noon (and what felt like hours of street navigation) by the time Olivia had made it home, and despite the fact that in all she had probably only walked for a total of forty-five minutes, her shoes were killing her.  
She made a beeline to the bedroom, unceremoniously dumping her shoes and interview gear onto the bed as she changed into a miles more comfortable jumper and denim shorts. Yes, it was a mess and something she very often scolded her son about, but it would be cleared later, once the throbbing and burning in the balls of her heels cleared up. She slipped her feet into a pair of gray slippers Inigo had pointed out to her last mothers' day. It had only been a few months ago, and she had been hesitant to allow him to buy them himself. Olivia had ended up buying them herself, allowing her son to present them to her as a mothers' day gift later in the week.  
She smiled at the memory as she padded back down the hallway, slipping her pump's clip over the pocket lining of her shorts, preventing them sliding out of the pocket at any point.

As she retrieved her bag, previously simply dropped on the hallway floor, she looked through the doorway to see her son on his stomach on the floor in front of the television, seal pulled close to his side, as he focused deeply on the coloring he was working on. A rush of love burst up through her heart as she watched him. He had inherited his father's pale blonde hair and golden-brown skin - he had even inherited his father's tendency to poke the tip of his tongue out whenever he concentrated particularly hard. Even if he was not her biological son she would not have been able to stop the rush of affection whenever she looked at him. He looked so much like Robin, she would be hard-pressed to not want to look after him. She had loved Robin, deeply, and though seeing her son look so much like his father hurt - a reminder of the love she had lost - she would treasure the fact that Inigo looked so much like his father, as though the Gods had given her a piece of him to remember him by.

It took a few seconds of watching her son color before Olivia realised that she had sunk to the floor, bag forgotten as tears streamed down her face. She took in a deep, shaky breath as she used the inside of her wrist to dry her cheeks, hoping that she was quiet enough to not be noticed.  
She quickly dug out her continuous monitor and manual monitor before fleeing back to the bedroom to take her blood glucose measurements. It had been a few hours since her set had been started, and her continuous monitor would most likely need calibrating, but more than that, she wanted to compose herself before facing her son again.  
Without thinking twice, she pricked her finger with the lancet, pressing the bloodied wound into the manual monitor's blood testing stick. As the monitor worked to figure out the measurement she checked her continuous monitor - it read at 90, which was not a bad measurement at all, considering the amount of exercise she had done, and the single slice of toast she had eaten at breakfast. Her eyes, still a little watery, flicked back to the manual monitor - it read at 88, still good, not different enough from the continuous monitor to require recalibration.  
She used her other hand to apply pressure to the lancet wound as she bumped the bathroom door open with her hip to grab a tissue to stem the bleeding with. She had always been a little prone to bleeding, which was more of a problem than it would be in most due to the nature of diabetes. With the tissue pressed firmly into the lancet wound by her thumb, Olivia returned to her manual monitor to tug the testing stick out of its port, to be dropped into the resealable bag of other used sticks, left in the hallway in the rush.

Lunch would come soon - while she did have to make sure she ate, it was more of a worry about whether her toddler was eating at the right times. It had been repeatedly drilled into her head by the older mothers at her prenatal care groups that if she did not have her son eating acceptable amounts at acceptable times, then she was a failure as a mother. The nagging feeling stayed in her head for the rest of her pregnancy, all the way along her baby's development into a toddler.  
While her blood glucose was not always of concern, the source of food always was - Flavia was kind enough to have offered Olivia free use of the food stores in her house for the first day or two while she settled in, she would soon have to go grocery shopping to prevent making herself and her son a burden on the household. Going this evening would be best, she thought as she reshuffled her bag contents to fit the two monitors back in, except that Flavia might not be able to care for Inigo for a while... In that case, maybe tomorrow morning-  
She was drawn out of her thoughts by her son sitting down directly in front of her, looking up into her eyes curiously.

He was finally ready for food.


	5. Chapter 5

Days passed by, one after the other, melting into a week before it became clear that nothing was to come of the interview.

She'd had others during that time, waiting for a call back, but by the end of the week it was obvious that none of them were going to offer her a position. It wasn't her first time in this situation, though. Being a single mother, especially when she was younger, was always a negative impact. She had met with more than her fair share of rejections whenever her employers-to-be saw that she had a child, and at such a young age.

She'd always ended up with a job eventually, though. She needed to carry on pushing forward, for the sake of caring for her son, at least for a few weeks more.

"Hi mom." Olivia stretched out her legs as she flopped backwards to sit on the edge of her bed, letting out a sigh of relief. She only had contact with her mother twice a month, when the rest of the family was out of the house, and it was always a great comfort to hear her voice. Activating the phone's speaker function, she placed the mobile on her thigh. It was a force of habit by that point; almost as soon as Inigo was able to talk, he wanted to know who was on the phone and what they were talking about. She'd taken to using the loudspeakers as a means of both placating him and allowing him to be in the loop of family affairs.

It only came off when the topic was urgent or private.

"Hello Olivia!" Her voice was just as musical as she remembered. All the stress she had felt up to that point, the strains of jobseeking and motherhood and everything else in her life, faded into the background for the moment. "How have things been, my lovely? How are you feeling? Are you and Inigo doing okay? How is the job hunt going?"

A smile spread over her face. Her mother's concerned, loving nature was a constant in her life, and though she resented it when she was a teenager, she was only grateful for the affectionate probing after becoming a parent herself. She felt almost like she were part of her family once again.

"We're... we're doing okay. There were a few interviews, but..." She trailed off, pausing for a second. There really was no easy way to phrase 'nobody ever really wants to hire a woman who became a mother at sixteen'. "I havent heard anything back yet. I think nothing's going to happen."

A sympathetic hum from the other side of the connection. If Olivia closed her eyes, she could almost imagine the expression her mother had whenever she made that noise, or the feel of her mother brushing her bangs from her face.

"You'll find something, lovely. You always did. Always could." A beat of silence passed between them. "Have you spoken to Inigo about school yet?"

Blood drained from her face as she sat up like a bolt, turning her head so fast it could have made her faint, making sure her son was not in the bedroom with her. If he heard the news from someone other than his mother, he was very unlikely to take it well. She snatched her phone up off her lap, fumbling with it as she turned the speakers off. This definitely constituted an urgent conversation.

"We've spoken a little bit about going to school," she began cautiously. "He knows he's going to school, and he's excited, but he doesn't know anything else. Please, mom... don't mention it to him when I pass the phone. I need to be the one to tell him, I'll tell him this weekend, I promise."

"Alright, lovely. I'll leave it to you. Look after yourself."

"Thanks, mom." She closed her eyes, head hanging forward slightly as she sighed, clutching the phone to her ear. She had sorely missed the casual affection they'd had before everything.

But this was her bed, she had made it, and she would lay in it. She straightened her back, disassembling the lump in her throat. "How's Ava?"

She hadn't seen her stepsister for many years. She'd spoken about her, sure, and there were always the memories of how Ava was as a child, how she was the last time they had been face to face, but unable to see or speak to her now. She was very much a Daddy's girl, and if she knew Olivia was still in contact with any part of what he considered to be 'his' family, well... It certainly wouldn't go down well with him.

"She's doing well. I think she mentioned something about elective classes, and Art, so it's probably nearly coming time for her to choose those." The shrug was almost audible in her voice as she laughed humorlessly. "She doesn't talk to me about these things, lovely, you know that."

As much as it would sting to admit, she was right. Ava's closeness with her father and Olivia was not extended towards her mother at all. Nobody ever quite understood why, since Ava had never known her birth mother - in fact, only her father knew the birth mother.

In all, it seemed that her mother served more function as Ava's emotional punching bag than a step-parent, especially since Olivia had been evicted.

A silence passed over them for a moment, before the sound of tiny, sock-clad footsteps thundering down the hall broke it. Inigo burst through the bedroom door, with all the excitement of a child that had woken up on their birthday.

"Mama, come look! Puppy loves me!"

His exuberance backtracked as soon as he saw the phone in his mother's hand. All thoughts of the dog downstairs were forgotten. "Mama, who's talking?"

She had only just opened her mouth to respond when he began clambering up onto the bed and into her lap, trying to get as close as possible to hear a voice. Olivia distanced herself a little from the mobile as she covered the mouthpiece with one hand.

"It's nana, sweetheart. She's telling me about things that happened to her at home."

Her son's eyes immediately widened, mouth dropping slightly open before he fully processed what she had said. He broke out into a huge grin, stretching his hands out to the mobile.

"Nana! I wanna talk to nana! Hi nana!"

Olivia smiled with a gentle sigh as she activated the speakers, handing the device to her son as she sat back to let him speak to his nana. They only had the opportunity to talk once a week - her stepfather worked overtime on Wednesdays, and Ava had horse riding after school on the same day - so damn her if she wasn't going to allow her son the one chance he had available to speak to his other family members.


End file.
